558
PARTISAN REVIEW
stereotyping are being exposed, Bloomsbury's precocious versatility is
thought to have much to teach us.
The current public enthusiasm for Bloomsbury has been nourished by
the scholarly mills which have been producing biographies and volumes of
letters and journals with regularity. More remarkable than the sheer number
of these is the commercial success they achieve. People await the newest
revelations about the personal intrigues with much the same eagerness as
Dickens's readers anticipated each new installment by the master. All things
bearing the Bloomsbury label have demonstrable value as collector's items,
so that even the office boy at the Hogarth Press, as well as the Woolfs' maid,
have been enticed to come forth with their reminiscences ofwhat that fabled
world was like.
It
is probably fair to say that the renewed interest in Woolf
on the part of the general reader is more a function of her position as "high
priestess" of the chic, provocative Bloomsbury way of life than of any de–
veloping awareness of the inherent merit of her fiction.
If sheer titillation accounts for much of the public'S attention, the
gradual realization that Virginia Woolf was, in fact, a woman writer (or at
least not a man, the androgynous theory having its own advocates) has also
played a substantial role. The polemical grinder of the feminist movement
has greedily devoured Woolf, spewing her forth as the appropriately com–
mitted feminist whose preoccupation with the cause is somehow the key to
her fiction. Such a view of Woolf is not particularly useful.
It
is of course
true that she was very much concerned with the economic and social plight
of women and deeply sensitive to the psychic crippling inflicted on them by
a male dominated world.
Orlando, A Room a/One's Own, Three Guineas,
and assorted essays eloquently testify to her involvement in these issues, as
well as to the deft way she can expose the absurdities of our culture. But as
a novelist Woolf does not inveigh against the horrors of masculine con–
straint; to focus on her fiction through any sort of politicized feminist lens
is seriously to distort it. Woolf herself deplored novels that preach, and hers
are conspicuously free from the proselytizing that frequently occupied her
when she was not at her desk
stru~ling
with her fiction . This is not to argue
that Woolf was not conscious of the assumptions of an environment which
held, for example, that Virginia'S brothers, but not Virginia, should go to
university; it is simply to protest against the reductionist view that Woolf's
novels primarily speak in any essential way to feminist preoccupations.
Woolf, in fact, hated the word "feminist" altogether-"What more fitting
than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much
harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word 'feminist' is the word indi–
cated. "-finding it divisive and inimical to the overall unity of civilized
people she so desired.
